“11 Is Better Than Nothing”

When his daughter’s killer received an 11-year jail sentence Friday, James Hudson was disappointed. But not completely.

“I would have preferred the whole 15,” he said. ​“But 11 is better than nothing.”

Hudson (pictured) spoke outside the Superior Court building on Church Street, where earlier Judge Brian T. Fischer sentenced Lissette Chiclana on charges of second-degree manslaughter with a firearm and carrying a pistol without a permit.

Chiclana, who was then 19, pulled the trigger that fired the bullet that killed Hudson’s daughter Jamese, then 16, in October of 2010 in an apartment in the Dwight/Kensington neighborhood. (Read about that here.) Chiclana said the gun went off by accident as part of a game. That convinced the jury to lower the manslaughter charge to second degree as a result. (Click here to read Register courthouse reporter Randall Beach’s account of last month’s verdict.)

“You point a gun at somebody’s face and pull the trigger — I don’t how you get more intentional than that,” James Hudson said Friday. My daughter didn’t like guns. She didn’t play with guns.”

Judge Fischer Friday sentenced Chiclana to 10 years on the manslaughter charge, five years — suspended after one — on the pistol-carrying charge. She had faced a maximum of 15 years behind bars on those charges.

Jamese’s family wanted the judge to give her the whole 15.

Her mother, Talana Hawley (pictured), described her sense of loss in a statement she hand-wrote to deliver at the sentencing.

“My life is incomplete,” she wrote. ​“I am trying to adjust my life without her presence but it’s difficult. I will never get a chance to watch her while she sleeps, to watch her graduate … to see her grow up and get married and have children.” She said she has seen a psychiatrist and attended support groups as a result of her daughter’s death.

Click here to read about an emotional community gathering in Dixwell at which 250 people tried to make sense of Jamese’s death.